Page:Weird Tales Volume 13 Number 06 (1929-06).djvu/11

little pointed depressions, set quite close together. They were the marks of girls' slippers, my friend, and appeared to have been made as the young women stood on tiptoe.

"'Now,' I ask me, 'why should three young women leave the motor in which they ride, run from the road, halt on their toes beneath these trees, and leave no footprints thereafter?'

"'It seems they must have been driven from the road like game in a European preserve at hunting-time, then seized by those lying in wait for them among the tree-boughs as they passed beneath,' I reply. 'And you are undoubtlessly correct,' I answer me.

"Nevertheless, to make my assurance sure, I examined all those trees and all the surrounding land with great injury to my dignity and clothing, but my search was not fruitless; for clinging to a tree-bough above one of the girls' toe-prints I did find this." From his pocket he produced a tiny skein of light-brown fiber and passed it across the table to me.

"U'm?" I commented as I examined his find. "What is it?"

"Burlap," he returned. "You look puzzled, my friend. So did I when first I found it, but subsequent discoveries explained it—explained it all too well. As I hâve said, there were no footprints to be found around the trees, save those made by the fleeing girls, but, after much examination on my knees, I found three strange trails leading toward the road, away from those trees. Most carefully, with my nose fairly buried in the earth, I did examine those so queer depressions in the moist ground. Too large for human feet they were, yet not deep enough for an animal large enough to make them. At last I was rewarded by finding a bit of cloth-weave pattern in one of them, and then I knew. They were made by men whose feet had been wrapped in many thicknesses of burlap, like the feet of choleric old gentlemen suffering from gout.

"Nom d'un renard, but it was clever, almost clever enough to fool Jules de Grandin, but not quite.

"Feet so wrapped make no sound; they leave little or no track, and what track they do leave is not easily recognized as of human origin by the average Western policeman; furthermore, they leave no scent which may be followed by hounds. Howeverly, the miscreants failed in one respect: They forgot Jules de Grandin has traveled the world over on the trail of wickedness, and knows the ways of the East no less than those of the West. In India I have seen such trails left by robbers; today, in this so peaceful State of New Jersey, I recognized the spoor when I saw it. Friend Trowbridge, we are upon the path of villains, assassins, apaches who steal women for profit. Yes"—he nodded solemnly—"it is undoubtlessly so."

"But how——" I began, when his suddenly upraised hand cut me short. Seated in the next booth to that we occupied was a pair of young men who had dined with greater liberality than wisdom. As I started to speak they wrere joined by a third, scarcely more temperate, who began descanting on the sensational features of a current burlesque show.

"Aw, shut up, how d'ye get that way?" one of the youths demanded scornfully. "Boy, till you've been where Harry and I were last night you ain't been nowhere and you ain't seen nothin'. Say, d'je ever see the chonkina?"

"Dieu de Dieu!" de Grandin murmured excitedly even as the other young man replied:

"Chonkina? What d'ye mean, chonkina?"

"You'd be surprized," his friend assured him. "There's a place out in the country—mighty exclusive place, too—where they'll let you see some-